Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [21]
Then JonBenét said, “Santa Claus promised that he would make a secret visit after Christmas.”
I thought she was confused. “Christmas is tonight,” I told her. “And Santa will be coming tonight.”
“No, no,” JonBenét insisted. “He said this would be after Christmas. And it’s a secret.”
—Barbara Kostanick
By midmorning, December 27, reporters were canvassing the Ramseys’ neighborhood. Almost everyone they talked to said the Ramseys were extraordinary people who enjoyed a lifestyle far more affluent than that of their friends and neighbors. They had moved to Boulder from Atlanta in 1991. They owned a vacation place in Michigan and a boat John Ramsey had built. Patsy was a former Miss West Virginia. What struck most of the reporters was how little the people who knew the Ramseys best were willing to say. One local reporter knew John and Barbara Fernie through their church, but the Fernies told him nothing. The Ramseys themselves were incommunicado. Their close friends told the press that they were grieving.
Another local reporter visited St. John’s Episcopal Church, which was located at 14th Street and Pine in downtown Boulder. He’d been married there, and Rol Hoverstock knew his daughter. He was welcomed to sit with his friends, the leaders of the congregation, just outside the pastor’s office, but they wouldn’t tell him anything. The reporters felt that this silence was creating a poor impression of JonBenét’s parents. What were they hiding?
After Detectives Patterson and Idler concluded their interview with him around noon, Fleet White drove over to the Fernies’ house to stay with John and Patsy. Later, at around 4:00 P.M., he went to the office of Michael Bynum, Ramsey’s corporate attorney, to talk to him about the situation.
Meanwhile, at police headquarters, Commander Eller was meeting with officers in the detective division to compile a list of possible suspects. The previous day they had put together a list of John Ramsey’s employees and business associates. Brainstorming, they added to the list several housekeepers, acquaintances, and friends of the Ramseys as well as relatives and others—like baby-sitters—who’d had close contact with JonBenét.
John Ramsey’s behavior after his daughter’s body was found—together with national child homicide statistics, which showed that a large percentage of child murders are committed by fathers—made the Ramsey family automatic suspects. Ramsey’s two older children had arrived from out of town after the body was found, but they too were added to the list. John Andrew Ramsey, a college student in Boulder who often stayed at his father’s house, was under particular suspicion. The police would soon learn that the suitcase found under the broken window in the basement belonged to him.
The police would take weeks—and even months—checking and rechecking alibis and taking handwriting, fingerprint, blood, and hair samples from almost everyone known to have come in contact with JonBenét, as well as from those who had no known contact or motive to kill her. The initial list included over two dozen people, and it grew larger as the public provided further leads.
John Eller assigned thirty officers to the case. Larry Mason led the team in day-to-day field assignments, but he and Eller butted heads over who should be interviewed and when, and over how to prioritize the investigation. Mason, with a battered face and a prizefighter’s compact body, stood no more than 5-feet-9 to Eller’s 6-feet-1. The tension between the two men was obvious and palpable. Particularly galling to Mason was the dismissal of the FBI’s investigators from the case. Mason had been a police officer for twenty-five years, and he knew how helpful the Bureau could be.
Larry Mason was a fourth-generation Coloradoan. His father, Allen, had been with the Boulder Fire